In both Douglas McGrath’s and Autumn de Wilde’s adaptations of Jane Austen’s Emma (1815), Christmas dinner scenes intimate the intersection of the familial love and comfort associated with Emma and Mr. Knightley’s romance. At the same time, these scenes draw attention to Knightley’s often paternalistic love for Emma. Taken together, these scenes at once associate Knightley to the comfort, conventions, and even the colors of the Christmas season, and crystallize his identity as the story’s central patriarchal figure. De Wilde’s Emma. (2020) shapes its “Winter.” chapter along the intersections of the romantic and familial plots of the story. The chapter opens with the arrival of Emma’s sister Isabella and her…
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“Do You See What I See?”: Christmas Scenes in Douglas McGrath’s and Autumn de Wilde’s Emma
The integration of the holiday season and all things Jane Austen might appear the doing of popular retellings. But many of Jane Austen’s contemporaries were probably reading Emma on Christmas and the days following the holiday given the novel’s publication on December 23rd, 1815. Although the overlap of the holiday and the novel’s publication is accidental, Christmas is mentioned eleven times throughout the narrative and key plot turns occur during and immediately after the Christmas party at Randalls. In fact, while we often turn to the novel’s opening to recite the famous first line which lists everything that Emma is—“handsome, clever, and rich” —and has—”a comfortable home,” a “happy disposition,”…
